Their Eyes Were Watching God - Essay Example

Their Eyes Were Watching God Before writing down my reflections regarding the reading of the book that I have done, I would first like to give a brief roundup of what I understood regarding the story of the book. The book revolves around the story of Janie’s quest for love. Janie was an African American girl, who had seen many hardships in her life. She was an illegitimate child since her mother just like her grandmother was raped. In this way the book describes the plight of women, Janie’s journey of finding love and the aspect of racism which was a common phenomenon of those times.

I must admit that it was a little hard for me to get used to the dialect used by the African characters, however one must praise the writer for the brilliance with which she is able to sway the tone and feel of the book from beautifully written English imagery and very apt descriptions of the plight and the emotions of the characters, to the crude and unstructured for of the African dialect and variant of the English language. Another interesting aspect of the book is that it is written as a flashback of Janie’s life as she reflects upon it to tell her story to her friend Pearl, since she needed consolation after the tough journey and experiences of her life.

The book starts in a very interesting way with Janie’s return to her second husband’s town, which she had left after his death to get married to a boy younger than her, popularly known in the town as “Tea Cake.” Hurston has very skillfully depicted the insatiable curiosity that is inherent in human nature, this she managed to convey through the conversations that passed between people of the neighborhood on Janie’s return and how they were gossiping about what might have happened which made her return to her Ex- husband’s town and that too penniless, when she left the town wealthy.

The book adequately describes the power distance relationship between the blacks and the whites in those times, how African slaves were treated, how they had no control over their lives and how the masters could take advantage of them. Janie grew up in a White Neighborhood, so she was mocked upon by the White children, reading the situation described makes one actually wonder what living in those times would have meant, which I feel is an incredible quality to possess as a writer. Another very interesting aspect of the book is its depiction of nature and its elements.

Janie always saw love as the relationship that existed between a pear-tree near her house and the bees that pollinate it. It is indeed a relationship one would normally not have reflected upon ever in life; however this book definitely makes one wonder about this relationship. Throughout in Janie’s life whenever the chapter of love is touched upon, since she got married three times and tried to find the love that she had desired in all her marriages, which she was finally able to find in her third marriage, Janie would always refer to the pear-tree and the bees and pray that her relationship with her husband would also be of such nature.

The element of nature, its constituents and its beauty have been done justice in the descriptions by the author. Many of the emotions of the characters have been connected to nature and its various elements. Moreover, the status of women in those times had been highlighted. The solemn bond of marriage and how marriages were treated in those times is shown with great care in the book. Whereas Janie searched for love in her marriage, her husbands were on the contrary looking for someone who would act more like a laborer in her first marriage and like a trophy wife in the second.

In both instances, the motives behind the marriage were not love but rather materialistic gains that might have been achieved through marrying a hardworking and beautiful woman. Therefore, one cannot help but feel that marriage was more like any other contract and less of a pure and spiritual bond. Sometimes in the book, the writer makes it difficult for the reader to get what she exactly means, may be because she deliberately wants to leave certain accounts of the story ambiguous and open to the interpretation of the readers.

However, on the whole I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book because it helps deviate one’s mind from the life of today and completely takes one into a different era, where a lot of areas of common ground can be found in how individuals feel about life and love.